The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Episode 21

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

This is a sample of the Munk Members-Only Podcast. The program provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. This week's Munk Members Podcast digs into three topics in the news: The growing discussion in mainstream media that COVID-19 may have originated from a virology lab in China – Why is what was once considered a fringe theory on COVID's origins suddenly getting prime time attention? And, what are the ramification for China if COVID was engineered by its scientists?; Belarus forces a Ryan Air passenger plane to ground to seize a dissent – How should the world respond to what was effectively a plane hijacking organized by a nation state?; and Canada's vaccination rates soar as we line up for “the jab” – Is it time to reassess Canada's performance when it comes to wrestling the pandemic to the ground? We discuss it all. To access the full length episode consider becoming a Munk Member. Membership is free. Simply log on to www.munkdebates.com/membership to register. Under your membership profile page you will find a link to listen to the full length editions of Munk Members Podcast. If you like what the Munk Debates is all about consider becoming a Supporting Member. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents). To explore you Munk Membership options visit www.munkdebates.com/membership. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Monk podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.W.Munk Debates.com and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www.munkdebates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, our latest monk members only podcast. This is our weekly program where we dig into the big issues and ideas driving the news. Our guide, as always, is the irreplaceable Janice Gross Stein. She's the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, an internationally renowned scholar and author,

and she's all ours for the next half hour. Janice, great to be in dialogue with you today. My favorite half hour of the week. Ditto, ditto. Three topics this week. Number one, has to be, Janice, this strange reversal in the mainstream press and by a lot of big governments, including President Joe Biden, none other, suggesting that there is a need to investigate in a serious and substantive way, the notion, the idea, the contention that COVID-19 emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan and that this virus, instead of being zon, zoonotic, i.e. coming from an animal, a bat, a civet cat. I don't know, you pick your species. This virus could, maybe, have been produced in a laboratory by humans. Give us your

sense of why are we suddenly having this conversation now when 12 months ago, this very idea, This very contention was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. What has changed why this new focus on a very scary idea? This is a weird story, Frederick. This is the only word I can use is weird because there's no new evidence. There is nothing new new that the end. intelligence agencies did not have before. So something else is going on here. Now, what's going on here? First of all, there was a WHO investigation, which produced a report that said that, in fact, it was a zoonotic

disease, that it went from bats in northwestern China and somehow infiltrated this wet market. But there was a lot of frustration with this investigation that was done by WHO scientists in collaboration with Chinese scientists. And almost as soon as that report was released, there was a sense this was not a full, open, and thorough investigation. And so all of a sudden, as happens, the real focus is on the Chinese government. and their denial of full access to the investigators. But how does that feed itself back? Well, there is a competing hypothesis here that this came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. No new evidence, but frustration with the Chinese.

Secondly, this was, as you remember, Donald Trump's favorite theory of how this virus started. And Republicans have been pressing Biden on the, So this seems like an easy give. He's got a big piece of legislation that is going through the Senate and House right now. He's all about bipartisan collaboration. Let's work with the Republicans and launch this 90-day investigation. So all politics is local, as we say. It all comes down to politics over and over.

There is a bigger picture here. Does it make a difference? Does it matter? whether this virus came from an animal transfer and it jumped to humans. It doesn't matter if it in fact escaped from the lab. So when we talk about this coming from the Wohanna Institute of Virology, let's distinguish between two alternatives. It escaped in an accident, which could happen,

or it was deliberately released by some. scientist. Nobody believes the second one, frankly. So let's take that conspiracy theory off the table that this was a virus that was deliberately created by the Chinese to infect the whole world. No, but there's no evidence for that whatsoever. But there is concern. And, you know, there are 11, here's the best way to witness to you. There are 11 intelligence agencies in Washington. to get a national intelligence estimate, these heads of these agencies get together in a room and argue everything out. I would usually get much from that process, right?

You get lowest common denominator. Two of the 11 believe there is a chance that the virus escaped by accident from the Wuhan lab. It's quite, you know, this was always a conceivable scenario that as we set up these labs around the world, including in jurisdictions like China where possibly the controls and or the technology was not the same as, let's say, the United States or Canada, that there would always be a risk of escape. Yeah. So, you know, certainly, you know, it's hard to rule that out. And it's clear that the WHO report and kind of relegating this theory to the appendices seemed to overly bow to kind of Chinese interest. And simultaneously, you're right.

The Chinese government has gone a long way. to resist, destroy evidence seemingly. There's a lot there that potentially lends credence to a cover-up. I guess what I wonder is, what does this really do? I mean, yes, in the short term, I think it sours U.S.-China relations even further. The Chinese are pushing back very strongly on this. But let's say we're able to validate that, yes, it came out of the lab. It was an accident.

they were doing things, this, you know, engineering these viruses to try to either understand how to kill more people or maybe possibly how to fight these viruses in the future. So, I mean, there could have been a valid reason why the research was happening. But all this leads me to just wonder, you know, is this a bit of a tempest in a teapot? It's not like, you know, China's going to pay reparations to the world or we're going to have some kind of, I don't know, moment of reckoning with the Chinese where we all admit that these technologies are dangerous and we all agree to a new set of codes and standards. That's not going to happen. The bilateral relationship is so bad that this seems like an interesting kind of, frankly, intellectual debate or exercise.

I just wonder what really is the consequence here. I agree with you. But you know, but I would say the answer. Just a little bit, Roger, because there is a concern. They're, you know, more generically, coming up on the agenda, is this question, are all kinds of research okay? Is it, in fact, safe to engineer viruses to understand in the future what kinds of things might come up and how we might treat them? And what are the safety protocols around that in labs? but sooner or later accidents happen in virtually everything we do sooner or later accidents happen and if you don't plan for the accidents you're going to be you're going to be in trouble and there

is an argument that we haven't done enough of that you know right now and raging on the agenda have we already gone too far down the road of artificial intelligence AI so that we've lost control of something? Is it too late to stop the development of kinds of intelligence, artificial intelligence, which we may not be able to fully control when we want to, when we want to check out of those kinds of systems? It's actually an important debate. It's the same with deliberate engineering of viruses in their variants. Do we need to look really hard at that? And it does matter, because, you know, in Canada, we have scientists who collaborate and do research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If, in fact, there are either safety issues or protocol issues or violations of accepted scientific norms in the future, well, then we won't partner.

So it is more than just a trivial discussion of a hypothetical issue. if there's any evidence whatsoever that there was an escape from there. Now, thus far, nobody, let me say this again, nobody has any hard evidence of that. Although there's, I was just reading, there's arguments that some of the evidence is there but has not yet been released. So we can go down this tunnel, this rabbit hole over and over again. But the bigger issue is a meaningful issue.

We want to not live through what we've lived through again. We have to do something about wet markets, we all agree, because wet markets make it easier for viruses from animals to jump to humans. But we may have to do something about the labs that manage and process in these environments and about the safety, particularly about the safety protocols that we use in these labs. You've been listening to a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the rest of the episode, consider becoming a member. Membership is free and available at www.

Wunk Debates.com. Once you've joined as a member, go to your membership profile to access the rest of this episode and all of our Monk members' podcasts. Thanks for listening.